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When author Michael Crummey was growing up in the small Newfoundland town of Buchans, his church didn’t have bells. So country-gospel songs would blare out from the steeple to summon the flock. It seems to be a pleasant enough memory for the 48-year-old Newfoundlander. But when a similar scene appears halfway through his fourth novel, Sweetland, it is during a harrowing point in the narrative and becomes disturbingly surreal. To avoid spoilers, let’s just say it involves someone lost in the foggy wilds of the fictional Newfoundland outport of Sweetland Island. In a desperate attempt to reach this particular lost soul, the townspeople blare the soothing strains of Ray Price’s Just a Closer Walk With Thee from the steeple of their shuttered church.

Picture it: Calgary in the early 1950s. Teens order Coca-Cola and sport the sassy look of long flared skirts with saddle shoes. The catchy melody of Red Foley’s Chattanoogie Shoe Shine Boy hits number one on the charts.

Mad Men moves inexorably towards its midseason finale, darkness visible. The spring finale airs Sunday, May 25. There will be a break of at least several months before the final seven episodes of its seventh and last season air — but that hasn’t stopped Mad devotees from speculating about the finale and what those head-scratching teasers mean.

Billy Bob Thornton seems tight-lipped at first when asked by a reporter to describe his character, Lorne Malvo, in the new Calgary-shot series, Fargo. “Here’s the great news,” he says quickly. “I can’t.”

“You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows,” Bob Dylan sang. But these days, a guide through the seemingly endless flurry of pop culture offerings is just what we need. With that in mind, here is what’s on the radar screen in TV, music and film for the coming week.

“You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows,” Bob Dylan sang. But these days, a guide through the seemingly endless flurry of pop culture offerings is just what we need. With that in mind, here is what’s on the radar screen in TV, music and film for the coming week.

As Matthew McConaughey has matured, his craft has matured with it: His performances are sharper, clearer and more nuanced, even as the roles he plays are becoming more opaque and mercurial. McConaughey is not the only reason True Detective is astonishing viewing, of course: Woody Harrelson has deepened and matured as well.

For the past two weeks, TCA — the Television Critics Association — representing more than 200 reporters, bloggers, reviewers and feature writers from across the U.S. and Canada, has been assembled in Southern California to hear pitches for new midseason television programs. As a writer for The Hollywood Reporter told his followers on Twitter, “We’re stuck in a hotel for a couple of weeks, every day, including weekends, covering upcoming TV shows.”

Kiernan Shipka, 14-year-old Sally Draper in Mad Men, cites Grace Kelly as one of her inspirations. So it should come as little surprise that Shipka embraced the role of Catherine Leigh Dollanganger, the young teen protagonist and narrator of Flowers in the Attic, a new Lifetime adaptation of the 1979 gothic thriller by V.C. Andrews.

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. - Show Bits brings you Sunday's 71st annual Golden Globe Awards in Beverly Hills through the eyes of Associated Press journalists. Follow them on Twitter where available with the handles listed after each item.

It’s one thing to choreograph good Charles Mingus. That’s the Mingus on display early on in Better Get Hit in Your Soul, Decidedly Jazz Dancework’s electric new show featuring the music of Mingus, a legendary wildman of jazz who blended a prolific musical life (100 albums) with a hair-raising, violent, domestically challenged (five wives) personal one.

Sex permeates nearly every waking moment of Masters of Sex, a new period drama from the U.S. premium cable channel Showtime, makers of the Emmy-winning anti-terrorism drama Homeland, the droll comedy Californication and, until recently, Neil Jordan’s Renaissance-era costume drama The Borgias, an Ireland-Canada co-production of Toronto’s Take 5 Productions.

Winning an Emmy is great and all, but for Elisabeth Moss — who’s nominated for two lead actress awards for work in two separate shows — Sunday’s ceremony is a chance for her to unleash her inner TV supernerd.

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